The Penn Center for Musculoskeletal Disorders is once again accepting applications for its Pilot and Feasibility Grant Program. Submissions should be related to musculoskeletal tissue injury and repair which is the broad focus of the Center and Grants are only eligible for Full Members (if you are not a member but would like to become one, please visitwww.med.upenn.edu/pcmd/memberinfo.shtml for instructions on joining).

Pilot grants will be due on February 28, 2014 with a planned start date of July 1, 2014 and we are expecting to award 3 new grants in this round. At least 1 of these grants will be awarded at $50,000 per year. This grant will be co-sponsored by the IRM Program in Musculoskeletal Regeneration.

Potential applicants are encouraged to send a short email, with your name, a rough title of your proposed project, a sentence or two (at most) describing the global hypothesis or objective and a note as to which of the four Research Cores (Molecular Profiling, Biomechanics, Imaging, Histology) you would use (core use is required for pilot funding). I would appreciate receiving this email ASAP, so I can advise and guide you on the appropriateness of your application idea within the framework of the overall Center. For more information on our Cores and Center in general, please see our web site atwww.med.upenn.edu/pcmd

Eligibility

• Only Full Members are eligible. If you are not currently a member, visit our website

• Categories of applicants include: 1) Established investigators with a proposal to test the feasibility of a new or innovative idea in musculoskeletal tissue injury and repair representing a clear and distinct departure from their ongoing research, 2) Established investigators with no previous work in musculoskeletal tissue injury and repair interested in testing the applicability of their expertise on a problem in this area, and 3) New investigators without significant extramural grant support as a Principal Investigator to develop a new project.

• Pilot and Feasibility Grants must use at least one of the Center’s Research Cores.

• Pilot project awardees are eligible for one year, with a second year to be considered. The second year of funding, the dollar amount of which would only be for up to half the year one budget, will be considered based on the progress report submitted after the first year of funding and funding availability in the Center. Please note that second year funding will most often not be awarded, and when awarded, will be done so primarily to new investigators; second year funding to senior investigators will be quite rare.

• Budgets will be for $25,000-$50,000 per year and timelines should be for one or two years.

• It is expected that these Pilot grants will lead to funding through other independent, extramural mechanisms. Therefore, the likelihood of future extramural funding will enter into the evaluation of these proposals explicitly.